Haruki Murakami Quotes

Nothing is ever simple. What do you do when you discover you like parts of the role you're trying to escape?

A lot of what I was wanting to do in my work and what I have been doing has been about the unexpected... that unexpected situation of wanting to be the heroine and yet wanting to kill the heroine at the same time.

I hate, and yet must love the thing I hate.

I'm pretty confident and, at the same time, I'm pretty insecure. I'm like a walking conflict.

I wanted to run away from everything but I wanted to run towards something too.

I go back and forth between wanting to be abundantly simple and maddeningly complex.

I like to not care that much about criticism, but I do care about it.

As much as I love boxing, I hate it. And as much as I hate it, I love it.

Part of me suspects that I'm a loser, and the other part of me thinks I'm God Almighty.

I am the epitome of a walking contradiction for various reasons, only one of which being that I feel my existence is of heaven and hell.

I have fervently been on both sides of that question at different times.

There's a thing that if you - somebody in faith is always troubled by doubt, and somebody by doubt is always wanted by faith. So it's a kind of paradox.

There is nothing in the world more pitiable than an irresolute man, oscillating between two feelings, who would willingly unite the two and who does not perceive that nothing can unite them

...a disgruntled reflection on my own life as a sort of desperate improvisation in which I was constantly trying to make something coherent from conflicting elements to fit rapidly changing settings.

Verily all things move within your being in constant half embrace, the desired and the dreaded, the repugnant and the cherished, the pursued and that which you would escape.

A lot of my work has been about the unexpected—that kind of wanting to be the heroine and yet wanting to kill the heroine at the same time. That kind of dilemma—that push and pull—is the underlying turbulence that I bring to each of the pieces that I make.

They will love me for that which destroys me.

As I go clowning my sentimental way into eternity, wrestling with all my problems of estrangement and communion, sincerity and simulation, ambition and acquiescence, I shuttle between worrying whether I matter at all and whether anything else matters but me.

I'm wired with a little bit of self-loathing, not that kind of self-loathing that paralyzes me, but it's there. The things I'm most loved for are sometimes the things that annoy me, not my favorite stuff, but those flashes of genius moments, they're called, I rarely see them as a one eureka light bulb idea.

Craving that old sweet oneness yet dreading engulfment, wishing to be our mother's and yet be our own, we stormily swing from mood to mood, advancing and retreating-the quintessential model of two-mindedness.

He looks like the sort of man who can't afford to leave, and doesn't want to stay, and so he is doing both at once.

I didn't tell him that what I was most scared of, most haunted by, was something I didn't understand and could never run away from. It was myself.

This mirror inside me shows. I can’t say what, but I can’t not know. I run from body. I run from spirit. I do not belong anywhere.

I'm an extremist, I have to deal with my own extreme personality, and I walk the fine line of wanting to die and wanting to be the ruler of it all.

I have a love/hate relationship with just about everything, but certainly with America.